P-Nut Envy

I’ve seen different releases of this song on the Buddah label, with assorted variations of the band name credit – “Circa ’58 and the Peanut Gallery” and just “P-Nut Gallery.” For this version of the single, on Buddah’s reissue label, Radio Active Gold, it’s credited to “Circa ’58 and the P-Nut Gold.” What it is is a bubblegum novelty pop tribute to that ancient kid’s show, Howdy Doody. It’s amazing that a children’s show was allowed to air in the ‘50s with a title that was basically a euphemism for poop. And didn’t all the characters in the show reside in “Doodyville?” How crude, how disgusting!

Howdy Doody always had a peanut gallery of kids in the show, and so does this single - their voices shouting out alongside the vocalist, who may or may not be Lanny Lambert, the co-writer/co-producer of the single. He may or may not also be the same Lanny Lambert who littered all my Google searches as the musician/record producer who impregnated Dana Plato while she was on Diff’rent Strokes, an act for which NBC fired her. This left a need for more characters on the show, so they married Phillip Drummond off to Dixie Carter and brought in her extremely annoying son, Sam. Along with causing me much irritation as a child, this contributed to the show becoming its own version of Doodyville. Thanks a lot, Lanny.

P-hil

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on Wednesday, June 06, 2007 at 5:47 AM.
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Not to mention some bubblegum-era(?) single I have called "Bring Back Howdy Doody". Maybe it's from the early '70s? (I recall a nostalgia craze then, always happens when pop culture goes thru dry trends like today, the charts are full of bad covers and the theaters full of terrible remakes, as we all know).